“Oh—Jesus…” A girl’s black face passed the door opposite.
Then another’s: “It’s scorpions…!”
A skinny black boy ran into the room with a stick. He opened his mouth and his eyes wide.
“Jimmy, you come on—!”
The boy (was he twenty? Kid staggered to his feet, a little scared, and not believing he was invisible behind some bright beast) kept on jerking at the stick.
“Jimmy!” she shrieked, “come out of there! It’s the scorpions, for God’s—”
Jimmy (Kid was surprised) suddenly closed his mouth, flung away his stick, and ran back through the doorway. Somewhere else in the house footsteps banged down steps.
Denny beat Kid to the doorway and extinguished. He leaned through, then looked back with a puzzled grin (others had already surged into the room, to fling their shadows in the red light across the wall.) “Hey, you see the way those niggers run?”
Behind Kid somebody overturned a chair.
He frowned, realized no one could see it, stopped frowning, and slid the stud over the bottom of his projector.
“Shit, man,” Denny said. “Them was some scared, black motherfuckers.” Shaking his head, he went on through the doorway.
“Don’t do that! Don’t do that! Don’t—”
“What the fuck they got in here?”
“Come on, Goddamn it, don’t do that!”
In the maroon light across the wall in front of Kid, an apish shadow grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller, till the hand, only slightly bigger than Kid’s, raised.
The hand clapped Kid’s shoulder.
“Hey,” Copperhead said. “They got some place here! Carpet on the floor…” His other hand gestured down; and up: “And look at all that shit on the ceiling.”
Kid looked.
Women in gauze and men in armor careered through woods, by lakes, and over hills above the molding.
Kid looked down to see Copperhead squinting out the door at the reddened street. “Well.” He looked back. “I’m gonna go see what they got in here.” While somebody screamed in another room, Copperhead’s hand fell again, in perfect amicability. Then he stepped through. Kid walked back through the room, looking for Lanya.
She was standing just inside the door, and angry.
“What’s the matter?”
“There were people living here!” she hissed. “What in the world…” She shook her head.
“I didn’t know that,” Kid said. “You picked the house.”
“And I didn’t know what you wanted to do with it!” She spoke with intense softness, as though she did not want the disk beyond the roofs to hear. “What the hell did you want to do?”
“Anything.” He shrugged. “Let’s go.”
She sucked her teeth and gave him her hand. He led her back through the room, only half as crowded, now.
Before neon confetti from the humming television in the other room, figures staggered and swayed.
“Here.” Siam thrust out a bottle with his bandaged hand.
“I gotta eat,” Kid said, “first, I think.” Then he took the bottle anyway and drank three small sips of bad, burning scotch. “You want some?”
“No thank you,” she said softly, and held his arm with both hands.
As they were walking up the steps to the third floor, Kid said, “I want—” the sentence resolved like an idea he had been straining to recall which only now gave itself to consciousness—“to write something down.”
He was surprised when she ran up to the top of the staircase, took something off a phone table, and turned with it. “Here. There’s no pen on this. But you’ve got yours.” He was both surprised and amused at what her urgency acquired in the beams through the cracked door at the hall’s end.
He took the phone pad from her, pushed in the door beside them—
Beneath the pea jacket, opened around her on the floor, the girl was naked. The edge of the window light, through the blinds, crossed the navy wool, and banded her ribs, like tape. On top of another girl, Copperhead’s freckled buttocks tightened, relaxed and rose, dropped and tightened, relaxed and rose, between heavy legs. The girl, Kid suddenly realized, was the one whose name he did not know, who had said goodbye, to whom he had made love.
“Oh,” Lanya said, matter-of-factly.
The girl in the pea jacket opened her eyes, cried out softly, and rolled over to clutch the green khaki at Copperhead’s thighs. Copperhead grunted, paused, looked back over his shoulder, said, “Hey!” and grinned hugely. He beckoned awkwardly. (On the floor, the other girl, breathing heavily, tightened her lips toward an expression that mocked anger.) “Join the party, motherfucker! You gimme one of yours, I’ll give you one of mine.”
“Knock yourself out.” Kid backed from the door, with Lanya’s hand in his.
The hall had filled with people. Kid was hit with black elbows and brown shoulders.
“What’s going on in there?” Blond Denny pushed between them.
“Stay out of there, cocksucker.” Kid put his arm around the boy’s chest, pulled him back.
“Why?”
“Because I’d get jealous as hell.”
Denny frowned, shrugged, said, “Okay,” and wormed loose.
Lady of Spain jogged against Kid’s shoulder, shook her head and said, almost drunkenly: “Shit! What a way to go. I guess we’re going, ain’t we?” She stepped through, pulling her chains behind her which had caught against Lanya’s shoulder.
Lanya tugged Kid’s arm. “This way,” she said loudly and other people looked. Kid pushed somebody aside (“Hey, how you doing, Kid?”), who pushed back a bottle at his face.
At the bottom of the stairs, two familiar, long-haired children holding hands (from the park commune?) peered up. “Are you having…a party?” They came up the steps, squinting as the light hit their eyes; light pulled down across their faces like window shades, lending them false sunburns. Their torn tank tops, blotched mauve, fuchsia, and cerise, rearranged forms in the new illumination. Other white people milled behind them, their mixed voices moving in a different range than the belligerent-to-shrill of the scorpions’.
“Is this Nightmare’s…Is this Nightmare’s nest?” a girl asked and pushed up past the first two. “Lanya!” She stopped halfway up the steps, her red hair a-dazzle, her face twitching to avert itself from the glare.
“Milly!” Leaving Kid the pad, Lanya ran down to seize Milly’s wrists. “What are you doing?” Lanya’s voice was delighted. As her shadow blocked the glare, Milly began—to giggle? No, cry. Kid looked through a bedroom doorway and the window beyond bright as foil.
He pushed between the people crowding the hall. “Fuck!” he shouted at somebody once. “Get out of the way!”
Somebody behind Kid said (he looked back to see Siam waving his bandaged arm high to get through; but it was Priest who was speaking), “No, man, this is the Kid’s nest. Nightmare ain’t here. Nightmare ain’t anywhere around.”
“Kid—?” which was the ginger spade who had once loaned him a plate; and talking about, not to, him: “You mean him over there? He used to be around the commune. I didn’t know that was the Kid. How do you like that?”
Kid pushed out onto the narrow balcony, surprised to find it empty, and looked up:
It was wide enough to be cut off both by the roof across the street and his own roof. I remember this, he questioned, from the other side of sleep? Then added, somberly quizzicaclass="underline" Deadly rays!
A weathered pride glared from beneath the chipped rail, with hints of gold paint, inward (shouldn’t it be out? Kid thought) toward the wooden doors, at isocephalic attention.